Mobile E-mail
Gartner predicts that wireless e-mail users worldwide will reach 20 million in 2006 and 100 million in 2009. "Mobile e-mail has primarily been a niche application for executives, largely based on BlackBerry. However, it is on the cusp of becoming main stream also for middle management and it will eventually pervade the enterprise as e-mail did a decade ago," said Mr. Jones.

Today, high quality wireless e-mail services are still expensive and this limits widespread deployment. However, Gartner predicts that by 2010, wireless e-mail will be a commodity and organisations will no longer need to cost-justify investments.

Gartner also predicts that by 2008, Microsoft will achieve feature parity with Research in Motion (RIM) and become the dominant e-mail provider.

Corporate Mobility
According to Mr. Jones, we are witnessing the 'growing up' of mobility, as it becomes increasingly controlled and managed as part of corporate architecture and strategy. Gartner's 2005 survey of European mobile professionals showed that enterprise priorities are evolving from individual projects such as e-mail or sales force automation, to mainstream strategy. As mobility becomes mainstream, enterprises are seeing the need to formalise this by developing mobile policies and strategies. They are making strategic decisions, such as which vendor will be their strategic mobile partner, for the first time.

Although large-scale mobility is still relatively rare, pilot projects will often lead to larger implementations and the familiarity with mobile technology created by these projects will reduce the barriers to future adoption.

Mobile Collaboration
Mobile workforce and collaborative technologies both feature in the top four priorities for chief information officers (CIOs) in 2006, according to Gartner's annual survey of 1400 CIOs globally.

Mr. Jones highlighted that people are no longer fixed in one place and this means they need more support for mobile collaborative work. Geographically distributed knowledge workers will be both highly valuable to the organisation, and sophisticated enough to be aware of a wide range of consumer mobile technologies.

"Mobile technology and market trends will facilitate collaborative applications. We will see increasingly powerful smartphones that can use Bluetooth, cellular and WiFi enter the market. In addition, consumers and employees are becoming more familiar with web based collaboration tools such as blogs and Wikis, which will speed up the acceptance of the mobile equivalents when they come to market", concluded Mr. Jones.

Consumerisation
The growing integration of mobile and wireless technologies into every aspect of life; home, office, home office, family, car and recreation, present both risks and opportunities for the enterprise.

Technologies such as WiFi, 'smart' mobile phones, mobile wireless enabled personal digital assistants (PDAs), as well as consumer software like Google Desktop and Skype, have steadily infiltrated the enterprise, and are posing security risks to corporate data. If organisations do not provide these facilities to its workforce, employees will embrace them anyway, which also presents a huge risk.

"Banning consumer technology from employee-owned devices is unrealistic, unverifiable and naive," said Mr. Jones. "Banning consumer tools is also counter productive, because employee's experiments will discover new ways to perform tasks in new and effective ways. Prevention will stifle innovation, so companies should educate their employees about the risks, define policies and be prepared to invest promptly in corporate solutions when users discover valuable applications."

Growth of Smartphones
As smartphones become widely available, medium-cost devices capable of delivering simple thin and thick client corporate applications, they will increasingly be used as business tools and evaluated by IT managers. This will challenge vendors to offer viable devices that address corporate deployment requirements.

Smartphone prices will fall, driven by new single processor phones, making smartphones accessible to a much wider population of consumer and business users. In addition, it means that a much higher audience of consumers and enterprises will be able to afford a mobile device that can run sophisticated applications.

Gartner predicts that smartphone sales in Western Europe will grow at a 49 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2005 and 2009. By 2009, one in three mobile handset phones will be a smartphone.

Source:  Gartner Group (www.europe.gartner.com/wireless)